Brandon A. DuHamel

The controversial 2000 film American Psycho from co-screenwriter/director Mary Harron (Alias Grace) was based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Set in the fast-paced 1980s, it follows the privileged, handsome, and narcissistic Wall Street executive Patrick Bateman (Oscar winner Christian Bale) who is all about greed and self-aggrandizement. By day he builds on the fortune and material things he has already accumulated, but at night the eviler demons inside him slip out to experiment with a dizzying array of sex and violence.

Kenneth Branagh has spent his career as an actor and director tackling the classics, from Shakespeare to Mary Shelley, and this time out he dives into Agatha Christie’s famous mystery Murder on the Orient Express, playing the author’s beloved Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

The 2014 wuxia film Brotherhood of Blades established the story of three members of an elite palace guard unit during the Ming Dynasty who must abandon their brotherhood and apprehend one of their own after he goes rogue, only to find themselves caught up in an even larger conspiracy. The Infernal Battlefield continues the story of these best-of-the-best guardsmen. It brings back much of the cast, but this is a standalone film that doesn’t require viewing the first to be understood.

2010’s Saw 3D was ostensibly the final film in the popular horror saga. And then, lo and behold, a mere seven years later, the franchise was rebooted with Jigsaw. Directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, the story finds the elaborate, gruesome Jigsaw killings mysteriously starting up all over again. As before, law enforcement is at a loss as to how the legendary serial killer Jigsaw—dead and buried!—could possibly be committing these nasty new murders. Meanwhile, as is the tradition with Jigsaw, a fresh group of victims has been ensnared in his intricate traps and forced to confess their own crimes or risk death.

In a not too distant future, the wealthy plunk down big bucks to enter Westworld, a Disneyland for adults populated by “hosts”—human-like A.I. androids capable of fulfilling their every desire. With a cast of A-list names such as Evan Rachel Wood, Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, and Ed Harris, this psychological, character-driven drama series goes beyond the gimmickry of its 1973 original to offer up a well-crafted exploration of what it means to be human as well as the blurred lines between good and evil and past and present. Could it be a replacement for Game of Thrones? Only time will tell.

The dramedy action film American Made from director Doug Liman (Swingers, Edge of Tomorrow) is based on the true story of airline pilot Barry Seal (played here by Tom Cruise), who in the late 1970s was recruited by the CIA to become a drug runner for the Medellin cartel in Central America. Seal eventually became a key figure in what would turn out to be one of the biggest political scandals in the following decade, the Iran-Contra “gate.” While this might sound like heavy material, American Made is far from a heavy film.

David Leitch is known mostly as a stunt coordinator on big action films like Tron: Legacy, but for Atomic Blonde he steps behind the camera as the big man in charge to direct an adaptation of the graphic novel series The Coldest City by Antony Johnson and Sam Hart. The movie is fairly dripping in neon and ’80s nostalgia. Charlize Theron stars as sexy Cold War MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton, tasked to go into East Berlin and work with embedded station chief David Percival (James McAvoy) in order to find a sensitive dossier.

Forget about the Mummy movies starring Brendan Fraser, which kicked off in 1999 and launched their own spinoffs. This version of The Mummy is in fact a reboot of Universal’s vaunted Classic Monsters franchises of the 1930s onward. Although it is meant to be a horror flick, this Tom Cruise vehicle directed by Alex Kurtzman—known more for his writing on TV series like Hawaii Five-0 than for directing—is less about horror than it is about big action set pieces.

Ridley Scott’s stunning dystopian allegory about the meaning of life, where technology ends and humanity begins, Blade Runner—from the Philip K. Dick cyberpunk novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—draws from many influences. Perhaps the strongest are the classic Fritz Lang film Metropolis and the Heavy Metal sci-fi magazines of the 1970s. The story follows gruff lawman Deckard (Harrison Ford) chasing androids called “replicants” that are nearly indistinguishable from humans.

Resident Evil: Vendetta picks up the mantle yet again for the Capcom strain of this popular video-game franchise. Sticking to the animé-oriented roots and offering some visceral action without the frenzied camera panning and ADD editing of the live-action The Final Chapter, the film brings together favorites from the franchise. Game characters Leon S. Kennedy (voiced my Matthew Mercer), Chris Redfield (Kevin Dorman), and Rebecca Chambers (Erin Cahill) battle wanted bioterrorist Glenn Arias (John DeMita), who plans to release a deadly virus in New York City as revenge for the government killing his wife.